Rabin Vows to ‘Teach a Lesson’ to Arabs Who Refuse to Pay Taxes
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JERUSALEM — Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said Tuesday that Israel will teach a lesson to Palestinians who refuse to pay taxes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Beit Sahur.
Participants at a closed-door parliamentary committee meeting said Rabin told them: “There will not be any attempt to boycott taxes. If it takes a month, it will take a month, but they will break.
“We are going to teach them a lesson,” he told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
The town’s mayor says some 600 merchants, artisans and workers in Beit Sahur, a mainly Christian, middle-class village of 12,000 people near Bethlehem, are boycotting Israeli taxes under the slogan, “No taxation under occupation.”
Rabin angrily rejected criticism by human rights groups, Palestinian nationalist leader Faisal Husseini and Western diplomats of army seizures of furniture, household equipment and merchandise worth more than $750,000 from residents withholding taxes.
His blunt language recalled tough statements last year, when he vowed to crush the Palestinian uprising with “might, force and beatings.”
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